Thursday, March 4, 2010

Part 11 of a 30 part series. Using Sagarin's Predictor ratings in a prediction formula, I'll weigh the probability of each conference team in each possible tournament matchup and through a Markov chain determine their chances of winning the tournament.

Last year, Davidson had a huge advantage with talented Stephen Curry. With Curry gone, they faltered to a 14-14 record, but enter the Southern Conference tournament with a new advantage: The tourney is taking place in Charlotte, just about 10-15 miles down the road from Davidson, giving the middling 2010 Wildcats home court advantage. This takes them from 2nd tier longshots onto a relatively crowded list of serious competitors for the Southern Conference's NCAA Tournament bid.

The Southern Conference is the first conference we see that divides their conference into two divisions. As a result, participating teams are seeded separately by conference:

The top two seeds from each division get byes from the opening round, while each division's #3 seed plays the #4 of the other, and each division's #5 plays the other division's #6. The winner of those games face the aforementioned top seeds, and everyone plays down as usual to a champion. Here are the brackets to help you make sense of it if needed.

Wofford, the best team in the Southern Conference, is the #1 South seed and the favorite to win at 9 to 5 (36.1%). Five teams have a realistic shot at winning this tournament, and as you'd expect four of them are 1st round bye recipients: Wofford, #1-N Appalachian State (15.8%), #2-S College of Charleston (12.4%) and #2-N Western Carolina (9.8%). The 5th, go figure, are the kids from down the street at #3-S Davidson (16.8%). This tournament could well become a dogfight to the finish between roughly equal teams once it gets down to the Semis and play moves from the smaller Bojangles Coliseum, down the street to the larger Time Warner Arena.

Here are the Southern Tournament Odds for every team involved:

Southern seeds:

1. Wofford: 9 to 5 (36.1%)2. College of Charleston: 7.1 to 13. Davidson: 4.9 to 14. The Citadel: 28.7 to 15. Furman: 149.4 to 16. Georgia Southern: 2078 to 1